Welcoming Francisca Gutiérrez Crocco at Our DiPLab Seminar (Th. 03 July 2025, 3:30 PM CET)

Our DiPLab seminar will welcome on July 03, 2025, at 3:30 PM CET, Professor Francisca Gutiérrez Crocco (Universidad Austral de Chile).

The seminar will be held both in person and online, at ISC-PIF, 113 rue Nationale, 75013 Paris, France. To register, click on the button below and fill out the form. The seminar is free to attend and in-person.

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Patching Algorithmic Management in Digital Delivery Platforms

In this Seminar, I will develop the concept of patching to analyse how digital platforms maintain algorithmic power in the face of worker disruption. Drawing on a four-year qualitative study of food delivery services in Chile and Argentina, I will shift the analytical focus from couriers to support staff—an often overlooked group tasked with resolving algorithmic failures. I will describe five key functions that support staff perform to sustain platform control over couriers: detecting disruptions, prioritising threats, creating and implementing solutions, and imitating algorithmic outputs. I will argue that platform control over couriers relies not only on automated decisions but also on discretionary, often concealed, human interventions. While support staff play a pivotal role in stabilising systems, they themselves are subjected to tight algorithmic surveillance and managerial control. These findings provide a socio-technical account of algorithmic management that challenges technological determinism, highlighting the labour embedded in supposedly automated processes.

Francisca Gutiérrez Crocco holds a PhD in Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She currently works as a professor at the Universidad Austral de Chile and as a researcher at the Millennium Nucleus for the Evolution of Work. She has led several research projects on labour transformations in Latin America, funded by grants from the Chilean Research and Development Agency and other international organisations such as the Internet Society Foundation. She has also worked as a consultant for trade unions, the Chilean government, the ILO and ECLAC, among other organisations. Her work has been published in leading labour journals such as the International Labour Review, Work, Employment and Society and Employee Relations.